CIRCLE Working Paper #57 examines the association between activities regularly used in high school civic education courses (e.g., staging a mock election) and their impact on key student outcomes. The authors looked at a range of usual practices used by social studies teachers and assessed whether various practices had a demonstrable impact on targeted civic outcomes for students.

The study is based on two waves of surveys with 1,670 students ages 14-19 from 80 social studies classes in the United States. Classes were recruited from a pool of teachers throughout one mid-Atlantic state who had expressed interest in training in an election-based curriculum.